Tom Parry Jones, who has died aged 77, was a Welsh scientist who developed the
world’s first electronic breathalyser in 1974 and sold the product to police
forces around the world.

The origins of the breathalyser go back to 1927, when a police surgeon in Marlborough persuaded a suspect to inflate a football bladder by breathing into it. By measuring the ethanol content of the exhaled air, the surgeon was able to testify in court that the man was “50 per cent drunk”.

In 1954 Robert Borkenstein, a captain with the Indiana State Police, invented the first “breathalyser”, a device consisting of a tube containing chemical crystals attached to a plastic bag, the crystals undergoing a colour change dependent upon the level of alcohol detected in a suspect’s breath.

When the British government introduced the Road Safety Act 1967, which defined the maximum level of alcohol a person could have in his or her body while driving and introduced the roadside “breathalyser” screening test, Parry Jones established a company, Lion Laboratories, in a converted garage in Cardiff to make the “Alcolyser” crystal-filled tubes for these early products.

But the Alcolyser was a somewhat crude device which could be used only to justify the arrest of a motorist on suspicion of driving with excess alcohol. The suspicion was then usually confirmed with a blood or urine test back at the police station. Some policemen continued to use more rough-and-ready kerbside methods, such as asking motorists to walk in a straight line.

In 1972 Parry Jones began examining the possibility of developing a fuel cell alcohol sensor as the basis of a more reliable screening instrument. His portable “Alcolmeter”, an electronic device the size of a cigarette packet, transformed the process of screening by providing police with a more reliable kerbside test, removing the need for a follow-up blood or urine test. However, it took some time to catch on, and Parry Jones recalled that he found “inventing the device the easy part, but producing it, developing it and selling it was the challenge”.

Parry Jones’s new device was approved for police use in Britain only in 1979; but the following year it won Lion Laboratories the Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement, and the product is now marketed worldwide.

The son of a farmer, Thomas Parry Jones was born on March 27 1935 and grew up in Anglesey. After taking a degree in Chemistry at Bangor University in 1958, he took a doctorate at the University of Alberta, Canada. Returning to Britain, he was appointed a lecturer at the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire.

In 1964 he moved to the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology at Cardiff where, with his colleague Bill Dulcie, an electrical engineer, he formed Lion Laboratories in 1967. In 1991 the company was sold to the American technology giant MPD.

Parry Jones went on to set up PPM, a company specialising in the manufacture of monitoring instruments for toxic gases, and established a small air charter company, Welsh Dragon Aviation.

Around a decade ago he established an endowment fund at Bangor University to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology. The fund supports an annual Bangor Science Festival, established by the inventor and by former students of the university.

Parry Jones also served as chairman of the Snowdonia Business Innovation Centre, which helps companies to commercialise products and technology; as president of the Welsh Centre for International Affairs; and as a trustee of the Engineering Education Scheme for Wales.

He was appointed OBE in 1986.

Tom Parry Jones is survived by his wife, Raj, and by a son and two daughters from a previous marriage.